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Ritual, Social Criticism, and the Russell Tribunal

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Ritual, Social Criticism, and the Russell Tribunal W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 5-2020 Up Close and Personal: Ritual, Social Criticism, and the Russell Tribunal Henry Blackburn Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the Other Philosophy Commons, and the Political Theory Commons Recommended Citation Blackburn, Henry, "Up Close and Personal: Ritual, Social Criticism, and the Russell Tribunal" (2020). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 1566. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/1566 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Blackburn 1 Up Close and Personal: Ritual, Social Criticism, and the Russell Tribunal A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Government from The College of William and Mary by Henry Sexton Blackburn Accepted for________Honors__________ (Designation(s): Honors) ______________________________________ Dr. John Lombardini, Director ______________________________________ Dr. Joel Schwartz ______________________________________ Dr. Christopher Freiman Williamsburg, VA May 5, 2020 Blackburn 2 Table of Contents Section One: Introduction ______________________________________________________3 Section Two: An Overview of the Russell Tribunal _________________________________6 Manfredi, Ritual, and International Law ____________________________________________9 Manfredi’s Account: Close, but No Cigar __________________________________________11 Section Three: History Invoked: Bertrand Russell ________________________________15 A Just History in America ______________________________________________________15 Russell and the Tribunal’s Beginnings ____________________________________________17 Section Four: History Re-Evaluated: Gabriel Kolko _______________________________19 America the Free? ____________________________________________________________19 American Hypocrisy in Vietnam _________________________________________________22 Section Five: History Realized: James Baldwin ___________________________________25 Exporting American Racism Abroad _____________________________________________26 Apocalypse Now? ____________________________________________________________27 Section Six: Social Criticism as a Solution? ______________________________________30 The Necessity of Critical Distance (And How to Achieve It) __________________________34 Section Seven: Up Close and Personal: Ritualized Social Criticism __________________39 Habitus and Ritual Practice _____________________________________________________39 Mimesis and the Tribunal’s Legal Structure_________________________________________42 Section Eight: Further Points of Exploration _____________________________________48 Section Nine: Conclusion _____________________________________________________50 Bibliography ________________________________________________________________52 Blackburn 3 Section One: Introduction The Russell Tribunal, a body formed in 1966 by philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell, was a private assembly of writers, intellectuals, and jurists organized to judge whether the United States government was guilty of committing war crimes against North Vietnamese combatants and civilians during the Vietnam War. The Tribunal has faced many criticisms since its operation, from charges of bias and one-sidedness — it only investigated whether the United States and its allies, and not the North Vietnamese, were guilty of war crimes — to indictments of uselessness in changing the course of the War — the United States would continue spending tens of billions of dollars on military operations until the war’s conclusion in 1975.1 These criticisms make it seem hardly correct to view the Tribunal as a formal legal body that sought to practice international legal judgement and deliver an unbiased verdict on U.S. military action in Vietnam — a view I term the legal view of the Tribunal. I will argue that the Russell Tribunal was, instead, a ritualized space that promoted the practice of and legitimization of performing social criticism among its members. My focus on ritual is strongly influenced by the work of Zachary Manfredi’s article “Sharpening the Vigilance of the World: The Russell Tribunal as Ritual,” which argues that the Russell Tribunal, through ritual, sought to engage with and influence the practicing of international human rights law. Under Manfredi’s view, the Tribunal performed a type of political practice that primarily worked to bring regular citizens into the analysis and condemnation of both human rights abuses and crimes against international law. While I believe that Manfredi is correct in using ritual as an analytical lens through which to understand the Tribunal and that many of the Tribunal’s members hoped that the wider 1 Alan Rohn, “How Much Did the Vietnam War Cost?” under “Economic Cost.” Blackburn 4 public, namely American citizens, would denounce the US’ actions and demand an exit to the war, I think the subject of his analysis, that the Tribunal sought to directly engage with and influence the practice of international human rights law, is incorrect: both on account of criticisms offered by Geoffrey Nice and Arthur Blaser that people-led tribunals have little, if any, track record in affecting how international law is practiced, and the more likely explanation that the Tribunal, whether explicitly stated or not, truly intended to be a space for social criticism to flourish. In light of this, I argue that the Tribunal can be analyzed as a ritual mimesis of a legal tribunal that promoted an efficacious level of social criticism among its members that is not adequately captured by significant theories of social criticism. As such, I will rely on the theories of ritual and habitus offered by Pierre Bordieu. While Manfredi only relies on a description and genealogy of ritual as provided by Talal Asad, I believe that Bourdieu’s theory allows for a more capacious understanding of the Tribunal’s internal operations as a form of ritual that, through the and promotion of certain dispositions and attitudes, strengthened its members’ social criticism. In making this argument, I will first provide a deeper background of the Tribunal and the legal view, provide an explication of the common criticisms this view faces, and explain how Manfredi’s argument seeks to provide a new understanding of the Tribunal in light of these common criticisms. I will explain why I disagree with what he argues is the true purpose of the Tribunal — influencing the practicing of international law — though I wish to retain and rework his use of ritual as the prime way to understand the Tribunal. Second, I will choose three members of the Tribunal — Bertrand Russell, the founder, Gabriel Kolko, a key witness, and James Baldwin, a voting member of the jury — and explore their critical writings against the Vietnam War. This will serve to show how these members (and undoubtedly many others) were fundamentally engaged in different forms of social criticism, both on their own and during the Blackburn 5 Tribunal, to disprove any idea that the Tribunal (or its members) was primarily focusing on the practice of international law. I will also show how the Tribunal-related writings of Russell, Kolko, and Baldwin displayed a more efficacious level of social criticism than their non-Tribunal writings to support the idea that the Tribunal might have affected how its members came to view and write about the Vietnam War. Third, I will engage with the literature on social criticism, specifically the theories offered by Michael Walzer, Sharon Welch, and Cornel West to investigate the writings of Russell, Kolko, and Baldwin and show how, on their own, they fail to hold the requisite critical distance to perform a fully effective social criticism.2 However, in light of these three members’ effective Tribunal-related writings, I will argue that viewing the Tribunal as a space for social criticism is ultimately a more useful, though still incomplete, way of understanding the Tribunal’s purpose (counter to Manfredi’s focus on the practice of international law). Lastly, I will return to the concept of ritual by using Bourdieu’s theory of ritual and habitus as a way to understand what exactly was occurring within the Tribunal. I will combine the lens of ritual and the concept of social criticism — as the theories of Walzer, Welch and West fail to sufficiently capture the range of critical distance that a social critic can have — to present a novel account of the Tribunal as a body that performed a mimetic reproduction of a legal tribunal that allowed members like Russell, Kolko and Baldwin to perform more efficacious versions of their social criticism. 2 Effective in the sense that while each performs a theoretically "pure” form of immanent, rejectionist, or prophetic critique, their non-Tribunal writings are simply less persuasive or forceful than their Tribunal writings. Blackburn 6 Section Two: An Overview of the Russell Tribunal Few events during the twentieth century were so widely discussed, denounced, or protested as the Vietnam War. Fought between 1955 and 1975 between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (or North Vietnam) and the alliance of the United States, the Republic of Vietnam (or South Vietnam), New
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